The Terrible Secret (2011)
blog.corememory.io
blog.corememory.io
Really, Tom is old... older than the elves, and he (like the willow and the huron) are tired of having these whipper-snappers come by and ask them to save them from danger and do their -chores- adventures for them. Old men just wanna have fun... and the gold ring ain't their bag (or problem).
Merry and Frodo are lucky they remember their time with him any more than Gildor or Farmer Maggot (or they remember him differently). In the old days we didn't expect everyone to be nice or have transparent understandable motives... and we walked up Mt Doom both ways.
In what universe? Every Tolkien fan I know, including myself, loves Tom Bombadil and sees his omission from the movies as their biggest shortcoming.
I, myself, like him just fine. But it is true that a lot of people who liked the more "swords and sorcery" aspects of LotR, did not like Bombadil. And that's a goodly portion of the people who read the books (tho' by no means all).
I feel sorry for people with so little capacity for whimsy and magic
If that's what you are looking for LotR might be one of the worst fantasy books one could pick.
As far as shortcomings go, I feel that the movie's bastardization of Faramir was the worst travesty because his honor in the face of having the ring in his grasp is one of my favorite parts of the books. Making him drag the ring-bearer back to the city ensured that I will never watch the movies again.
As well, that crap with Aragorn getting lost and then fighting back by himself was an utter travesty, and the crap with his fiance was crap, too (except for where they subbed her in for Glorfindel in the race to Rivendell), as much as I understand that they wanted a woman to play a more prominent role. That said, Eowyn's story should have been enough and at least they didn't mangle her.
But, yeah, it would've been really cool to have a Patrick Stewart Tom Bombadil.
That said, I personally feel their treatment of Aragorn was the best liberty they took. He felt fairly one-dimensional in the books; his whole character was about his destiny to be king and he reminded everyone he met. In the movie he doesn't want power; he struggles between his fear of it and his desire to help the world. This struggle over the kingship mirrors the struggle over the ring (which both he and Gandalf face, among others) and makes him much more compelling as a character. I also liked the Arwen subplot; she really wasn't a character at all in the books. I thought their relationship was powerful and expanded upon his being pulled between the realms of elves and men (of which his Numenorean heritage was a microcosm).
I don't remember where I heard it, but it was many years ago, that the "bad guys" can come in some many varieties, have so many different kinds of character defects and obsessions and whatnot, but that the true hero is always the same kind of boring because goodness itself is not flashy. That is why Hollywood always portrays their heroes with some kind of serious character defect, unless it just writes stories with only an anti-hero of some kind.
One must never forget that Tolkien lived through WWI whose horror and tragedy gave him a firm grasp of the complex realities of both good and evil. The resulting simplicity is why LoTR has stood the test of time as a truly epic story.
History has shown us that any powerful figure whose sense of inner direction comes without struggle or conflict is probably incredibly evil, even (especially) if they don't see themselves that way.
Everyone who says that the perfection of the human being is impossible have never tried, thus they are acting just as the contemporaries of Boltzman and Einstein who derided their advanced understandings of the universe. The reality is that most people never try to better themselves, especially if the techniques suggested stray beyond their preconceived notions of the nature of the universe and themselves. As well, most people are caught up in their desires for pleasure and material wealth and generally have no concern for those outside of their social circle, be it based upon ethnicity, form of religion, class, sexual orientation or gender identity.
That the incremental perfection of each human being is possible is provable simply by noticing that every choice we make can be better chosen each day, by conscious thought and honest self-reflection on our past deeds combined with earnest study. We must consciously shift our societies' dynamics from destructive competitiveness to constructive cooperation, from selfishness to selflessness, from callous indifference to caring compassion. Love is the essence of humanity, without such agape (service-based love for all other human beings) we are left as the unenlightened animals we all begin as. Only we human beings have the ability to consciously rise above our foibles.
It is also our nature to require an inward connection with our Creator to effect our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. There is a science of spirituality that is beyond any form of religion but most modern scientists deny such science for lack of external evidence. The evidence must be perceived within oneself, just as Boltzman and Einstein's contemporaries needed to read the papers and understand the processes that they were describing. The difference is that denying the spiritual path indeed makes it not exist for that person, for each person must embark on that endeavor themself before being able to feel its reality. Those outside of that circle of understanding must have an open mind and heart to enter that circle or else they will never experience it and that is just another aspect of our human reality: we are free to choose to remain ignorant of it, but we all know what history says about Boltzman and Einstein's deniers.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
I liked the passage as a curiosity because of the (English) language, but story-wise I think it was pretty weak and did not bring much overall.
I do sympathize with the decision to cut him from the movies; his chapter was a large and neatly isolated part of the story, and the movies were strapped for screen time as it was. But it was still a loss.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bored_of_the_Rings
BOTR: Tim Benzedrine
Allusion: Benzedrine, a stimulant drug popular during the 1950s, and a reference to Timothy Leary.
LOTR: Tom Bombadil
BOTR: Hashberry, wife of Tim Benzedrine
Allusion: "Hashbury", the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, or hash(ish)-berry.
LOTR: Goldberry
I have assumed Gene is Eugene McCarthy, US Senator from Minnesota and candidate for president.
I still think of the two hobbits as Moxie and Pepsi. And the Battle of Minestroni.
I was far more aggravated by replacing Glorfindel with Arwen, as a first example.
There were a lot of irritations, but the only really unforgiveable fuckup for me was the complete dog's breakfast they made of the Pelennor Fields.
Bombadil’s scene is one of my favorites alongside the one where Frodo almost gives the ring to Galadriel but she resists [2]. Another meditation on power.
[1] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/103559/did-the-rin... [2] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/86701/when-frodo-o...
It was originally envisioned as a sequel to the Hobbit with a slightly more grown up audience. When JRR wrote it, he hadn't even settled on Sauron as the bad guy. He vaguely thought the bad guy would be Treebeard! He got Frodo and co. all the way to Rivendell before he connected his other story (the Silmarillion) to the LOR story.
Bombadil was left in, in my mind, because he had to explain how four hapless hobbits could throw the black riders off the trail and still escape from the forest. And he didn't really have any editorial constraints until the movies came along.
Sure, you can invent some just-so-story to explain him but the truth is that the tale evolved in the decades it took to write and so it has vestigial parts.
Tom is presented as someone both powerful enough to take the ring and protect it, but also someone who'd forget about it and lose it in a swamp. He's not playing by the rules that Tolkien established for the rest of the characters in the books.
He could have power beyond comprehension, or zero power, because Tolkien just didn't know what to do with him. But it's up to the reader to make that decision.
Is he One Punch Man, or is he really just a nobody?
I was pretty sure when they went to be in his conttage that night, they wouldn't be waking up to a happy morning. I didn;t really trust him until they got to Bree.
- Elrond knew of Tom Bombadil.
- Tom Bombadil had heard about Frodo's journey from both elves and hobbits. I.e. He was known to and communicated with both.
- Was there not a hobbit song about him?
As to why the hobbits had little to do with Tom Bombadil...
- A character of his power could easily have chosen to wipe the hobbits memories. Maybe this was his usual approach to hobbit intruders?
- Another possibility it that given Hobbits extreme social taboo about adventures and their fetish for respectability it is quite possible that many hobbits had interacted with Tom Bombadil but few talked about it (e.g. Farmer Maggot).
If Gildor and Farmer Maggot met him, they would have found him entirely unremarkable: just another hobbit with a strange taste in homesteading.
the text does not say otherwise. But the text is correct that Elrond does not seem to have clear memories of him. From LOTR itself:
> [Elrond said,]‘The Barrow-wights we know by many names; and of the Old Forest many tales have been told: all that now remains is but an outlier of its northern march. Time was when a squirrel could go from tree to tree from what is now the Shire to Dunland west of Isengard. In those lands I journeyed once, and many things wild and strange I knew. But I had forgotten Bombadil, if indeed this is still the same that walked the woods and hills long ago, and even then was older than the old. That was not then his name. Iarwain Ben-adar we called him.
He is not even sure it is the same person that the hobbits are referring to.
But I’d never thought of him as a conservationist and rescuer of animals (and flora) rejected by polite society! A Tolkeinish John Muir. How lovely!
The memeworld works in mysyerious ways.
That's a bit too Manichaean for me.
(NOTE: At the time of this writing, the title is "The Terrible Secret".)
And I always thought Tom Bombadil was the Green Man.